Progressive Christians Uniting

“God! God!  How beautiful your world is!  Sometimes it seems to me I should do something noble, some deed you would truly love to show my thanks!”  Thus speaks the hero of a lovely medieval drama called ”In April Once.”   Haven’t you had these feelings?  Wouldn’t you love to do something noble?  For God? For others?   

 

I hope you are leaving these hallowed halls with at least a touch of that idealism.  Dear God, if there is any hope for a return to compassion within the structures of our society, it will have to come from the likes of you; you who are sitting on top of the world with one of the finest educations available and, hopefully, with a religious framework that shapes your minds and hearts in a way that puts those at a disadvantage at the front of your concerns.  Having graduated from one of your colleges, and knowing the present administrators a bit, I imagine you have picked up in the very air and water here something of the importance of giving back, of participating in this mystery we call goodness.

 

“God!  God!  How beautiful your world is!”  Where is that noble deed that we may do to show our thanks?  What do such deeds look like? 

The author of the Gospel of John calls this idealism, this sense of goodness, “the feeding and tending of sheep.”  The reality is that the dramatic heroism that young person in the middle ages dreams of is not often accorded to us.  Such an occasion rarely presents itself.  But do we recognize the possibilities for goodness when such opportunities do arise?  And if we do, how many of us are wise enough or brave enough to seize the moment?   

 

It occurs to me that Pomona’s South American scholar, Dr. Miguel Tinker Salas, and his President, David Oxtoby, did seize that moment as they responded to the federal government’s harassing interrogation.  Ah, but you see, this college could have continued their whole tenure and not been presented with such a situation against which to react.  I remember when a major donor threatened to withdraw funding from Cal Tech because Jonas Salk was on their faculty.  Cal Tech stood firm, and that very large monetary gift came to Pomona instead.  I asked Dr. Smith what would have happened if the situation were reversed, and his reply was, “But it wasn’t.”  Maybe someday the Claremont Colleges will have to see a large legacy go to someone else. 
Edward R. Murrow had his McCarthy, Schindler his Holocaust, Cal Tech Jonas Salk, Pomona Dr. Tinker Salas.  And us?  Well, the truth is that all of us can be heroes, even without such dramatic moments or difficult choices.  To live a heroic faith is to live out of our sense of justice and righteousness.  It is to live grace and mercy, day by day, every day, and that is not simple or easy.  It can be hard work. 

   

This morning, I invite you to heroism, dramatic, daily, or both.  My plea is that you will live lives full of these everyday deeds that God will truly love, so that you may show your thanks; and you all have much for which to be thankful. 

 

Perhaps before we delve into daily heroism, we should remind ourselves of the evils that are so pervasive today and against which, I believe, our various faiths call us to live.  For example, in my United Church of Christ calendar, we have noted recognitions of past and present corporate sins: Holocaust Remembrance Day, Armenian Martyrs Day, Eco-justice Sabbath, and so on.  Each of these observances reminds us that we all bear some guilt as a people for the evil in our world.  Today, besides our obvious complicity in the Middle East tragedies, we are paying too little attention to the genocides in Africa, to the people in Darfur.  I understand your campuses are not letting these go unnoticed.  Thank you. 

Today is Mother’s Day and a very happy one to all of you mothers here!  I remember a speaker at a high school graduation who noted that there were more parents per child these days.  So happy mother’s day to you birth mothers, adoptive mothers, step-mothers, what ever role you played in the lives of these precious young people!  Happy Mother’s Day and congratulations!   Mothering in any form is no simple task.

 

Even Mother’s Day reminds us of the dark side of life.  It was created to bring the mothers of the world together to work for peace; but here we are, with so much killing of one another around the world, it has made us numb.  Today is also a reminder that, for too long, we put women, and mothers especially, on a pedestal, which is a pretty small place from which to maneuver.  It is a cage, gilded or not, and we are still wrestling with how to achieve true justice for women as well as for ethnic minorities. 

 

Perhaps your congregation recently acknowledged that atrocious genocide we perpetuated on the first nations of this country and the unjust incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry.  Black Americans remind us of the most inhuman form of slavery that is their legacy.  The roll call of the sins of our inhumanity is long indeed.  Today, even entrenched skeptics are beginning to agree that the human race has raped the earth, perhaps irreparably. 

 

We Christians must confess our deep complicity in the murder of six million Jews.  The painful truth is that our scriptures, read indiscriminately, led to these horrors in the name of Christ.  We come to the God of Israel and to the God of all creation, this ground of our being, through Jesus.  At the same time, we must acknowledge with great appreciation the equal validity of not only the Jewish story, but others as well.  The Muslim story is even less familiar, and it is crucial right now that we quickly deepen our understanding of this faith if we are to have any chance at peace.                                                                                                                                   

Other passages in our Scriptures have been used to batter homosexuals.  In my congregation in Long Beach, we are very aware of the pink triangle worn by gay men who were among the first to feel the terror of the Nazis and the black triangle worn by lesbians.  Too many still feel they have a license to discriminate against gays and lesbians.  If it were not so personally damaging, the arguments against gay marriage and gay rights would be laughable.  We cannot declare homosexuality sinful and not be responsible for the murder and oppression of gays, and the closet is a very unhealthy place to be shoved.  You cannot condemn something as sinful, and not be a part of the oppression that will inevitably follow. 

And speaking of reading our Scriptures, we must do so with all the scholarly and literary skill possible so that such insidious concepts as “intelligent design” will not derail our science nor demean the poetry of our myths.  We should also be aware, given these sinful prejudices, that our language often reflects these biases.  Language leads to behavior.  Once we label a difference as sinful, then we are inviting a holocaust, and I cannot emphasize that too strongly.  Doctors who perform abortions cannot be called “baby-killers” and not be in harm’s  way.  Israel, India, and we ourselves know all too painfully that extremist rhetoric leads to the murder of national leaders.     

 

So we begin with recognition and confession. 

 

Now .. What lessons have we learned?  What does it take to live out our various faiths into justice and righteousness?  What does it take to participate in the mystery of goodness?  What must we do to ensure that our everyday lives will include those noble deeds that God will truly love? 

The first lesson, it seems to me, is that we must become knowledgeable.  We must get information from a variety of sources and never allow the American press or information media to be suppressed.  With the centralization of many of our country’s newspapers, this becomes  more and more difficult.  With the corporate ownership of the media, we must be evermore vigilant.  Knowledge is freeing but only if we have the truth, only if we are exposed to all positions. 

 

The second thing that we must be sensitive to is the frog in the warm water syndrome.  I think much of the evil in the world today is creeping up on us.  We have not been dropped into that proverbial boiling water, but there are issues and concerns slowly coming to a boil all around us: growing economic disparity, ongoing wars for all the wrong reasons, homelessness, and you can think of other concerns that trouble you. 

 

Third, we simply must begin to really know one another, to understand and appreciate different customs and cultures, beliefs and practices.  Only in this way will we begin to truly accept and admire the other’s humanness.  First hand knowledge is crucial to participating in the mystery of goodness with others.  It is important that our commitment to social justice undergo continuous renewal through the pursuit of honest inclusive dialogue.  Often differences are beautiful and exciting.  Sometimes differences are just that, they don’t much concern us; but we must learn to live with differences happily, with genuine appreciation and understanding.